Case Number 09589: Small Claims Court

PERIOD PIECE

The Charge

Sex as a Sickness

The Case

A French midget arrives in Los Angeles to write a screenplay. His narrative
will revolve around an oddball who has sex with stuffed animals and makes porn
movies featuring drunken frat boys partying in hotel rooms. Our small scribe
takes up residence in a rundown hotel, where he meets a kind-hearted prostitute.
Our streetwalker has recently broken up with her ex-cop boyfriend and has found
a gullible guitar player who is willing to marry her. Still despondent over the
break-up, the policeman convinces his son to leave their house and camp out in
the woods. They spend their days looking at girlie magazines, smoking, and
drinking. In flashbacks, we see just where the liquored-up lawman went wrong.
Instead of arresting a couple of heroin-shooting gasoline thieves, he merely let
them off with a warning. They later confront him and beat him up for his
autographed picture of Jesus. Their crime spree causes the department undue
embarrassment and, along with the bottle and the failed fling with the whore,
our peace officer is a badly broken man. In the meantime, the prostitute's
father fantasizes that he is having sex with an adult star named Serenity. When
that proves unsatisfying, he gets a dead pig to cuddle. Eventually, he chops it
up with an axe. It's just a typical day in LaLa Land and this perverted
Period Piece proves that it is a city that often wallows in its own
oppressive offal.

If Giuseppe Andrews is indeed a cinematic genius, Period Piece is his
Short Cuts. Maybe a better way to put it is that this segmented,
vignette-oriented movie is a lot like watching Paul Thomas Anderson on peyote.
Proving that his previous efforts -- Trailer Town, Who Flung Poo?,
Dribble, and Touch Me in the Morning -- were no accident, this
amazing moviemaker tackles his favorite subject (sex) in a new and novel manner.
Instead of using vulgarity and comedy to color his ideas, Andrews grabs
naughtiness by the neck and chokes the ever-lovin' spit out of it. This is a
raw, rude indictment of the physicality of fornication -- a film that attempts
to address the need for genital stimulation meshed with a cold, callous
commentary on aging and arousal. Using his standard corps of actors (and a few
new faces here and there), Andrews employs an epic scope in his exploration of
Eros. Like an anarchic Altman, there are many interlocking stories here, almost
too much to take upon a first viewing. But once you get past the scattered,
stream-of-consciousness style, you will see how this amazing auteur finds room
to deconstruct carnal concepts like phone sex, prostitution, pornography,
bestiality, implied pedophilia (the constant raping of teddy bears), and the
delusion of fantasy. Almost everyone in this film is functioning under the spell
of sex. We see the truth behind the "characters" and it occasionally
makes us sick.

Though he's listed on the cover as the "star" of this film,
Andrews' staple Tyree is really secondary to the storyline. This is an ensemble
effort, with many standout moments and performances. Still, Tyree is certainly
an important shock value part of Andrews' ideal. Filming almost all his scenes
nude, showing complete full frontal nudity, this 90-year-old novelty has a
peculiar onscreen presence. We can tell he is merely mimicking the words Andrews
offers him. It is part of this director's moviemaking mystique. Still, there is
a genuine undercurrent of performance to what this homeless man does. He plays
pathetic so well and wraps his labored line readings in enough emotional truth
that we can't help but feel for this frail freak. Sure we will giggle as he
crumbles pork rinds on his privates, but when he suddenly stops stuttering and
places a gun to his chest, the lost look on his face is a telling treatise on
how the elderly are treated. The rest of the cast is equally compelling. Like
gonzo gone grotesque, Andrews uses regulars Walt Dongo and the amazing Vietnam
Ron as icons to this notion of real world naughtiness. These men crave physical
love, but each one has issues that would render them repugnant to others. By
peeling back this sickening social scab and exposing it to the routine of
reality, Period Piece attempts to humanize their need, to make it less
lewd and more nauseatingly natural. Instead of prettying up their passions,
Andrews gives us the warts-and-all approach.

Andrews goes another step further. By making his only female character, a
prostitute, an asexual being (we never see her naked) and introducing the drug
addict thieves into the mix, he juxtaposes need against nookie. While the rest
of the actors are crowing about various prurient positions, we hear the deadened
dimensions of jaded junkies who would rather shoot up than off. These middle-act
moments, with their creative camera tricks and Barbie-doll banality (the guys
get off staging their dolls in X-rated routines) are like the laughs in a human
horror film. They are necessary to give the more meaningful moments bite and
gravitas. Similarly, the material involving the molesting of teddy bears is an
outrageous illustration of how sex destroys the innocent. The violation of a
children's toy has very clear connections to the loss of virginity and the
notion of adolescent maturity. Indeed, almost everything about Period
Piece is a philosophical missive about misinterpreting libido for love, pain
for personal connection, and desire for dreams. There is much more here than a
gross-out comedy. As its title suggests, Period Piece is a specific
statement about the world today. In our era of mass-marketed sex, the influence
of XXX material is like an infection. Some people are drowning in the disease
and these are the men that Andrews wants to champion. After all, their needs are
as valid as anyone else's, they're just not as pretty, or profound, or
proper.

Looking a little better than previous efforts, the transfer of Period
Piece is actually pretty good. The 1.33:1 full-screen image is colorful and
clean, with only minimal video defects like bleeding and flaring to be found.
Unlike Touch Me in the Morning, which had a dreamlike monochrome vibe,
the hues here are upfront and obvious here, making for some very memorable
scenes. This is still a straight camcorder production though, and all the
no-budget aspects - like limited lighting and low production value -- are
frequently visible. Still, Troma treats these titles better than some of their
big-name offerings. Another issue of significance that usually doesn't get
addressed in other reviews is Andrews's songwriting skill. In Touch Me in the
Morning, there are a couple of classic scenes where the actor plays
keyboards and sings touchingly twisted songs as entertainment for the elderly.
In Period Piece, more of these amazing works show up to add real
emotional underpinning and depth to the sequences and the performances within.
The Dolby Digital Stereo setup on the DVD really does these compositions proud.
The speakers spit out the tunes in musically masterful ways. The dialogue is
easily discernible and the lo-fi aspects of the production provide little or no
problem from an aural perspective.

Troma also packages Andrews's efforts like real works of art and adds an
embarrassing amount of extra material to each new DVD. This time around, we get
an interview with Giuseppe (insightful and intense), a collection of trailers, a
look at Tyree spewing sex poetry from Touch Me in the Morning, and a text
biography of this naughty nonagenarian. The best bonus feature though is the
full-length cinematic experiment entitled Jacuzzi Rooms. Nothing more
than a simple setup -- four of Andrews's company getting smashed in a seedy
hotel room -- this improvised look at men out to party is strangely
spellbinding. There are the typical taunts about penis size and sexual prowess
and, with liquor involved, things soon turn violent. You can tell that Andrews
stopped the drunken antics about halfway through and delivered typed pages
filled with poems and elegies to keep the cast coherent. Such a scripted
strategy really doesn't help. If Period Piece is a representation and
rejection of sex, then Jacuzzi Rooms is a debauched denunciation of
booze. Both features show Andrews moving into far more disturbing territory,
with effectiveness equal to that in his comedies.

When placed up against the rest of his amazing canon, Period Piece
proves difficult and obtuse. In trying to tie together several storylines and
multiple characters, the gifted Giuseppe Andrews really ran the risk of losing
the homemade feel of his films. While it is far more arcane in its creation than
Trailer Town or Touch Me in the Morning, this is still a
fantastic, if fatalistic, looks at humanity and its outer reaches. Along with
Jacuzzi Rooms, we have a pair of perturbing and disturbing movies.